


Sfumato

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-03-18
Updated: 2006-03-18
Packaged: 2017-10-03 19:29:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sfumato

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Trin on her birthday.

John says he wants to go somewhere he's never been before; Rodney says he wants to go somewhere that boasts indoor plumbing and an understanding of flush toilets. That earns him an eye roll, and the dramatic flourish of an atlas that was unearthed somewhere in the depths of the SGC. It's so old that it still proclaims the existence of a Soviet empire, Yugoslavia, and more than one Germany. Its mountains climb to imperial, not metric, heights, and the pages crackle when John opens it. Rodney snorts and reminds him that the SGC is only coughing up enough money for them to spend a month somewhere nice and warm, not enough for them to build a fully functioning time machine, and really, the seventies were bad enough the first time around; he still has nightmares about the polyester.

John ignores Rodney with all the practised ease of someone who's known him for years and through wars; sits with him at a corner table in the commissary and drags one finger across yellowed pages. Quickly across the British Isles (too cold for either of them), slower over France (_No_, Rodney says shortly, _Bad memories_; and that's just enough for John not to question him), quickest over the Czech Republic (neither of them particularly wants to see Prague, not now), arcing up over Russia (_Tell me: in what way, exactly, do I look like a masochist?_) before sliding back down to rest somewhere in the middle of the paper landscape.

He looks up at Rodney, lifts an eyebrow in an economy of motion that manages to ask several different questions all at once. Rodney shrugs, folds his arms, and twists his mouth in a way that manages to answer them. "Fine," he says, "Sure, whatever," because it's not like he's not just planning to sleep away their four weeks on the Air Force's dime wherever they go.

* * *

At least, that's what he planned on; but John is persistent, and John wants to be a Proper Tourist, and John is smiling again, sometimes. Rodney wants to stay asleep in their penzione in the mornings; and eat gelato and drink real coffee in the afternoons; and maybe, in the evenings, wander slowly along the Arno. The city's bustle is slower, then, the slanted light not so pure, and the quiet movement of the river doesn't remind him so much of the seas around Atlantis.

That's what he planned on; but John is persistent. He's at Rodney's door at six in the morning, knocking softly until Rodney opens it, the line of his mouth still sleep-softened and his t-shirt twisted half-way round his stomach. John says it's so they can beat the queue for the Gallery, because the best time to see Florence is in the cool of the morning, before the crush of tourists arrives along with the heat of the midday sun.

Rodney bitches about how early it is all the way down in the elevator. He bitches about how it's March, and there are no tourists, and there will be _no_ crowds, while they get lost down yet another twisting little laneway. He bitches about the cold for an hour standing in line, until the sun comes up and warms that patch right between his shoulder blades, and John buys him a (surprisingly good) coffee from a street vendor. He subsides a little, then, sips on the rich, dark blend, lips and tongue tentative around the scalding liquid. He surprises himself by humming a little in his throat, music he hasn't thought of in years; surprises John, apparently, because that earns Rodney a quizzical look from behind a new and very expensive pair of Italian sunglasses.

Then they're inside, out of the white morning sun, past the ticket office and through the gift-shop. John drags him up the wide stone stairs, one hand loosely clasped around the fine bones of Rodney's wrist. Rodney finds himself shivering a little, even though the temperature is perfectly controlled in here; only a little shiver, a little contraction of sensation, running up his arm whenever John starts talking about _duocento_ and _quattrocento_, line and form. He's trying his best to ignore it, just like he's trying to ignore the way John gives him side-long looks as they walk down the wide galleria (a little shy but mostly sly), the way he takes off his glasses as he herds Rodney from the Botticelli room, which is slowly filling with people in groups of ones and twos, down the corridor to the Tribune.

Rodney tries his best to ignore it, this feeling that's living under his skin and coiling at the base of his spine. He blusters and gesticulates and tilts his chin up to look at statuary and paintings and moulded ceilings; looks at everything that John's explaining, but not at John himself. They stop at the door of the Tribune, where John points out some particularly interesting architectural detail. Rodney rolls his eyes and complains that John's clearly just memorised some guidebook in the desperate yet misguided hope that it will impress someone.

In the pause between one insult and the next, just as Rodney is drawing breath to deliver a truly brilliant parting shot (if he says so himself), all about fly-boys and hot Italian chicks and Vespas and the flaws in those plans of the afore-mentioned fly-boys which relate to the afore-mentioned hot Italian chicks, John smiles at him and says "Is it working?" There's nothing Rodney has which can answer that, and he opens and shuts his mouth once, twice, until John grins and drags him into the still empty room.

* * *

There are things that Rodney comes to understand over the next few weeks; there are things that will take him years to grasp. There are some things that, for all his vaunted and lauded intelligence, he will never manage to figure out; just things that he will come to believe and fear, trust and hope.

Still, he comes to understand the first thing of many at half past four on a Tuesday afternoon not long after the almost-end of the world, lost somewhere in the Tuscan countryside. He's standing at the edge of a meadow full of sunflowers with a map that doesn't tell him the way to Siena, and a USAF pilot who's turned out to be so alarmingly useless at navigation that some idle corner of Rodney's brain is already working on improvements to the jumpers' guidance systems.

Rodney turns then and sees him, _sees_ John in a ratty old cotton shirt, sleeves rolled up; sees how his hair is ruffled by the breeze, how his mouth has relaxed at the corners and how some of the tension leaves the muscles at the neck and shoulder when he looks back at Rodney. They're standing in a landscape that looks like it was painted by an oversized, demented child wielding a paintbox of primary colours; surrounded by yellow flowers and blue sky and ochre earth, with John the dark-and-pale blur at the centre of it all. It's so painfully bright that it hurts Rodney's eyes to look at it, and he digs his nails into the soft skin of his palms to keep himself from closing his eyes. _Oh_, he thinks. _Oh_.

* * *

Later, they stay near Genoa, right where green mountains tumble down haphazard into the calmer green of the sea. They're near to the city, but somehow, this stretch of the coast is incredibly quiet and still; so much so that if Rodney were to close his eyes and pretend, he could imagine that they're the only two left. There's a certain kind of peace in that, maybe; but with everything Rodney knows, and with everything that's happened to him over the past two years, it's too, too easy to imagine. He only ever does that the once, just once.

He prefers instead to curl himself up in white cotton sheets, around and over John, and sleep in their bedroom, spare and white. Another kind of peace here, more uncertain; bound up in the thrum of John's heartbeat beneath him, the breath that stirs his hair, the still-hesitant curl and flex of John's fingers where they rest on the flare of his hipbone.

At the point where night gives way to morning, Rodney thinks he could be content with this, that he could make his peace with it, that this could be his peace.

But John is persistent.

In the morning, before the sun is up, when everything is still dim and John's eyes are grey in the half-light, Rodney is dragged out of bed (_What? What? Why do you have some kind of freakish fixation with pointless wilderness hikes at the crack of dawn_?), and away from their villa, up, up the side of the nearest mountain. (_Hill, Rodney_.)

John sits down when they reach the top (or as close as they get, because Rodney might be the fittest he's ever been, but still, not exactly athlete material here), stretches his legs out on a bed of grass and wildflowers, tilts his head back and watches the sun rise. Rodney watches the line of John's throat.

Sometime around mid-morning, John produces a picnic basket; the elaborate size and weight of it makes Rodney suspect that it must be the product of what was probably a spectacular blitzkrieg of charm against the women in the nearest village. Still, it's not like Rodney's going to object to that, because _breakfast_. He's making happy little noises as he digs through the basket, finding fruit and pastries and a flask of coffee.

John's fingers brush against Rodney's as he digs a peach out of the basket, curling his fingers around the sun-warmth of it for a moment before biting into the flesh. Rodney swallows once, twice; and there it is again, that impulse to close his eyes. He doesn't, though; keeps his eyes wide open as he leans over and licks at the corner of John's mouth where some of the juice has spilled free. The juice is warm on John's skin, and Rodney can taste it, taste peaches and sweetness and John, knows the flavour of him; he can feel his stomach tighten and his eyelashes finally flutter closed, and he leans in, leans in.

* * *

They spend their last day higher up in the mountains, in some tiny village with an unpronounceable name, as far from the blues and greens of the Mediterranean as they can possibly get. They find the local bar and get quietly drunk on a disgustingly large amount of Montalcino; drunk enough that Rodney no longer really cares about how sick he will be on the plane tomorrow, or about the vicious-looking scar that curls, pale and shining, the length of John's leg from ankle to hipbone. He's not drunk enough that he can't look up at John, though, face turning towards him like some plant blindly seeking the sun. John looks back at him, and their talk stills for a moment, and so does Rodney's breathing. _Oh_, he thinks. _Oh_. The second understanding.

Later, they are curved together in bed, skin to skin, while Rodney's heart-rate slows and John's breathing steadies. "Best vacation ever," John murmurs to the nape of Rodney's neck, so quietly that Rodney wouldn't hear him if he weren't always listening for him.

"Mmm?" Rodney says, half-way between curiosity and sleep. John tightens one arm around him, whispers something to his skin, something that sounds like _You took me somewhere I've never been before_. And Rodney smiles, and he sleeps.


End file.
